26 September 2015. Lost in Thought at St Lukes

I was lucky to get a ticket for this sold-out 'mindfulness opera' - lucky in the sense that it was sold out and lucky to have been part of this interesting event. It was conceived by Rolf Hind and is hard to describe - it was not quite a mindfulness workshop; nor was it a musical four hours. On balance it was more a workshop with music than music with a workshop and I'll remember it for the vegan lunch and concentration on the breath than the music that came and went.

What struck me most was the complete silence that the participants adhered to throughout - not just not talking, but there was hardly a cough or clearing of throat through all those hours.

It will be interesting to see how the life of this work progresses. There is clearly a demand for it but it can only be taken part in live and the limited number of participants at any one staging must make the economics tricky.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30897593

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/23/vertical-time-where-mindfulness-and-music-meet-rolf-hind-opera

23 September 2015. People, Places and Things at the National Theatre

I found this a very impactful and engaging account of the road to recovery from addiction. On reflection, it was perhaps a less 'makes you think' play than 'gives you insight'. The horrors of withdrawal were well evoked, with suddenly multiple actors appearing as if a flock of birds.

The acting was tremendous, particularly by the lead, Denise Gough, and the set design also was outstanding - a crisp white arch from which pieces - e.g., the bed and desk - rose up or dropped down.

Most impactful to me were the scenes towards the end when the lead is reunited with her parents who portrayed the almost defeated air of suffering this testing child but who then tested her by presenting her with the box of all her discarded drugs - left in her room, the box glowed with its evil energy and we were left with  slightly ambiguous ending as to what happened next.

20 September 2015. Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto and Mahler's fourth Symphony at the Barbican.

The soloist (Murray Perahia) and Conductor (Bernard Haitink) made a splendid pair as they came on stage and gave a riveting performance of the piano concerto. Perahia seemed so fluid and mesmerizing that I was quite shocked when it came to an end.

The Mahler I found a little harder to get into with its themes from a childhood, but I thought the Soprano (Anna Lucia Richter) for the Finale was excellent - an opinion I was glad to see endorsed in a review the next day 

17 September 2015. Song from Far Away at the Young Vic.

This was something of a tour de force by the single performer who spent about half the eighty minutes in the vulnerability of nakedness.

'Play' does not seem the right work to describe this unfolding of the story of two brothers, the protagonist and his dead sibling. The remaining brother uses the vehicle of a series of letters to his dead brother to describe how he had learned the news of the death, flown back to Belgium and then had some soul-bearing exchanges with his parents and sister.

17 September 2015. Ai Wei Wei at the Royal Academy.

One is greeted by the first exhibit in the Courtyard. A cluster of eight trees, assembled from pieces of trees from all over China. like the entire exhibition, this piece is conceptual, illustrating the dead hand of uniformity that extends across the country.

The exhibition itself also benefits greatly from explanation. For example, it would be hard to appreciate the vast collection of steel rods (even though they are pleasingly laid out) without being told they were recovered and straightened from shoddily-constructed buildings in Sichuan that were demolished by an earthquake.

Other items were more playful, such as the table that had been cut in two and re-assembled so that now legs engaged the wall as well as the floor, rendering it useless.

All the work embodied the Wei Wei signature meticulous craftsmanship. He is a big employer of traditional craftsmen - as I remember from a film that accompanied his poppy seed installation at Tate.

All in all, this is a fine exhibition and one that will repay more than one visit - though in a very different way to a less conceptual body of work.

20 August 2015. Hamlet at the Barbican

This hot ticket with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role would have had to be truly exceptional to live up to the hype and expectation. As it was, it didn’t quite though I’m very glad to have been in the audience.

The set – of the inside of Elsinore Castle - was stunning but wore a bit thin as it was invariant apart from metamorphosing from opulence to decay.

All the acting was great but sometimes the lines of some of the actors got muffled, even to me in a good stalls seat. Certainly the whole event was very engaging and presented in a way that was easy to follow.

However, despite all that, I came away thinking neither that it was my theatrical event of the year nor that BC gave the most remarkable performance of the year – which is not to detract from the awe one has to feel for the sheer scale of the role.

18 August 2015. Hard to be a God

Attending this extraordinary film is rather like entering an altered state for three hours. To describe it makes it sound like an ordeal; yet it isn’t. Shot entirely in black and grey, the film takes us to a planet that is like earth but stuck in the dark ages. People wallow in shit and misery and are subject to the whims of less than benign leaders. One scene that will forever stick was a group of people advancing with nooses round their necks and carrying the large frame from which they will hang.

I just found myself sitting and gawping and making the perhaps obvious conclusion that this could well be life on parts of this planet - today.

15 August 2015. Provincial Punk at the Turner Contemporary

This exhibition seemed to me well worth the trip to Margate. It gave a clear appreciation of the scale of Perry’s work centred upon a large collection of sizeable items of pottery – all carefully and mischievously decorated. The exhibition also contained some early films and more recent enormous tapestries, including the Walthamstow Tapestry. 

14 August 2015. A Number at the Young Vic

This play by Caryl Churchill was a brief (55 minutes) exercise to stimulate one’s thinking on cloning. The audience was divided into (I think, four) groups who could not see each other. Each group was ushered in to a space fronted by what appeared to be a mirror, so we sat uncomfortably looking at ourselves until the play started. Then the mirror revealed its one-way quality. The two actors were an actual  father and son (John and Lex Shrapnel) and their dialogue centred on the son’s grievances at finding he was a clone for another son – and that the cloning laboratory had made several duplicates of him.

So we were presented with a series of points to ponder:

• Is a clone of a lost person, much the same to those who love him/her as the original?
• How would you feel if you were a replacement for an original?
• How would you feel if you weren’t the ‘real’ replacement but an illicit extra?

Then, with a bit more thought the list extends:

• Forget cloning, to what extent do we replace lost others with people who will ‘do’ in their place? For example we replace one lost lover with another – maybe quite similar. Lovers are sometimes replacements for parents. 
• The children we care for are but the ones we conceive. Would we care equally for all the potentially conceived? So, do we care for the person as an individual or for them as a role?

Given the brevity of the play, it could have the option of some sort of audience discussion at the end - in the manner of World Factory. But, it was, of course, a play rather than a seminar.

4 August 2015. Caro in Yorkshire at the Hepworth and YSP

This large exhibition of Caro’s work required more time than I gave it. A large part of the exhibition was housed in the Longside Gallery at YSP which closes, rather eccentrically, at 16.00 Anyway, what was truly fascinating there was the coverage of Caro’s journey from the figurative to the abstract. The display of the earlier work made clear the formative role of Henry Moore and included drawings with Moore’s annotations.

As for the abstract works, either they please you or they don’t. To me, they are great and have to be seen for the innovations that they are.